Management Division Team 3, Rookie Manager (4)
A woman, a girl, a woman—whatever she was—with a towel draped over hair still damp from the shower. Innocence and sexiness lived in the same face. The features were beautiful, and not the ordinary kind of beautiful. The admiration came out of me on its own. Of everyone I had actually seen with my own eyes, she was the prettiest, and the gap between her and second place was absurd.
She shouldn't be a singer. She should be an actress.
"Our youngest is up first again today. You were up late practicing yesterday. You tired?"
"Even if I am, I have to be... It's the first broadcast we've had in a while."
"Look at Lee Songha. All grown up."
Lee Songha, Neptune's youngest.
According to her profile, she had graduated high school just this past spring. Even among Neptune, a group where every member was billed as the visual, her looks sat a cut above. She was the kind of presence that could stare into space thinking of nothing at all and still look like she was contemplating the fate of the world.
Her position was listed as sub-vocal and sub-dancer, though I had the feeling I needed to study what those positions actually meant. I knew soccer positions and baseball positions. Girl-group positions were a first. I hadn't even known they were carved up this fine. It was culture shock.
"Oppa. When do we leave?"
"We've gotta be out by four-thirty. Thirty minutes left."
"Okay."
Even the voice was good. She sang for a living, so the vocal production would be solid as a baseline, and the diction was clean, but more than anything there was rhythm in it. An addictive voice that simply lodged in the ear of whoever was listening.
That kind of thing is rare.
If she had been an actress, she would have booked every project that came her way by now. It was enough to make you want to cry, how wasted it was.
Lee Songha rubbed her sleepy eyes and came toward me. Water fell, drop by drop, from hair that had only been covered with a towel. My hand twitched with the urge to wipe it for her. She stopped right in front of my nose.
Is this the moment I'm supposed to say hello?
The thought had barely formed when Lee Songha dipped her head in a small bow. Then, before I could bow back, she tilted that long pale neck and looked past me.
"Could you move over a little?"
"Sorry? Oh—sure."
So her business had been with the refrigerator I was blocking. The moment I stepped aside, she opened the freezer and pulled out a tub of ice cream. Across the lid, in thick marker:
I had thought only a house with quadruplets labeled food like that.
"Everybody up!"
Kim Hyunjo shouted again.
"The youngest is already awake and getting ready! What are you unnies doing!"
His figure overlapped with my old self, the one who used to wake four kids, pack them off to kindergarten, and get them to school.
Haa... That had been a war. Wake one and another would be face-down asleep on the sofa. Wake that one and a different kid would crawl back under the blankets. No end to it... Damn it. Stop summoning those kids. I don't look like a bright-eyed new hire. I look like a working dad ground down by childcare!
"Good morning..."
A door plastered with dinosaur stickers opened. Messy curls. A woman in a yellow nightgown came out with her head hanging, rubbing her eyes.
That was Lim Seoyoung.
Twenty-one. Position: sub-vocal, lead dancer. The profile had said a lovely baby face and a voluptuous figure that caught you off guard.
It was exactly that. If you didn't know better, you would have thought she was the youngest, not Lee Songha. She looked like a high schooler.
She was also Neptune's variety face. She had even done a brief stint as a guest reporter on some cable show I had never heard of—the girl playing breadwinner, running herself ragged to drag an all-but-unknown Neptune into the public eye.
"Oppa..."
"Yeah. Wake up. Quick."
Lim Seoyoung, wobbling her way over, suddenly snapped her eyes wide.
"Lee Songha. You're gonna get fat. Do you have any idea how many calories that is?"
Songha, scooping ice cream where she stood, flicked Seoyoung a sidelong glance and turned her back. She hugged the tub as if to hide it and kept working the spoon.
"If I eat it like this, you can't see it, right?"
"Then Unnie can just not look."
"It's my favorite! How am I supposed to not look!"
"Want a bite, then?"
"Don't tempt me! I'll get fat!"
"Tsk, tsk, tsk, nagging since dawn..."
"Tsk-tsking your unnie? Wow, Oppa, listen to her. She won't give up a single word. If you'd landed on any other team, a little kid running her mouth like that would've gotten called rude and yelled at every single day, cried in some corner, and quit because she couldn't take it. Do you have any idea how many girls out there have nasty personalities? You better recognize you're living the soft life on our team."
The supposedly lovely Lim Seoyoung turned out to be this house's resident nag. As the scolding dragged on, Kim Hyunjo steered her by the shoulder toward the bathroom.
"Wash up quick while I get the others up. Something simple... you want an apple, at least?"
"Yeah, yeah! Thanks, Oppa."
Once he had finally gotten Seoyoung into the bathroom, Kim Hyunjo sighed.
"Those two are handled. I've still got the other two to wake, so somebody peel some apples..."
"I'll do it."
I raised my hand. This, I could do. I took two big apples from the crisper and found a fruit knife in the corner of the sink. A moment later, peel thin as paper was ribboning off under my hands.
Would you look at that. Even I can't help admiring it.
Choi Geon-young, who had been watching, clapped.
"That's art."
"Add up every piece of fruit I've ever peeled and you'd get a whole orchard."
Look after quadruplet snacks every single day and you turn into a master fruit-peeler whether you want to or not... Enough. Seriously. Too much.
I peeled both apples, set them on a plate, and jabbed forks into the pieces. Right on cue, Neptune's other two members were up. LJ, the blonde, half-Korean main rapper. And the team's eldest, the main vocal—Lee Taehee, the charismatic leader.
According to their profiles, anyway.
Lee Taehee shoved a hand up under her T-shirt and scratched her stomach. Even with Kim Hyunjo hurrying her along, she sat on the sofa perfectly unbothered and started dozing again. LJ was stretching in front of me, eating apple.
"This is good. It's sweet."
"Eat plenty. If it isn't enough, I'll peel more."
Why do I feel like I just became the sample clerk at a grocery store?
Still, if I was handing out samples to Barbie dolls, I could live with it. Where Lee Taehee was long and slender like a model, LJ was a perfect hourglass, the way mixed girls often were. A full chest, a waist that flowed along an S-curve into the hips, and legs that stretched clean and long beneath short training shorts—unreal enough to look fake.
So girl-group duty is nice. It is really, really nice.
"Hey, save me some apple!"
"Don't wanna."
Seoyoung came out of the shower and said it in a rush, and LJ held up the last piece to taunt her. The two of them bickering must have been routine. Kim Hyunjo didn't even try to stop it. He only sighed. In the end I peeled more apples.
After that, while the members washed, changed, and got ready to leave, Choi Geon-young and I waited like a pair of barley sacks somebody had hauled in and forgotten.
Even so, seeing something of my nephews in the Neptune members had loosened me up a little. Choi Geon-young was still stiff as a board.
"I really can't get used to this."
"Yeah. First day, so."
Choi Geon-young covered his mouth and dropped his voice.
"Boys' middle school, boys' high school, engineering college. No older sister, no little sister."
"Then it makes sense you wouldn't be used to it."
"I'm telling you. Still, it's nice. It is nice."
"It's completely nice."
We worked hard to hide the way the corners of our mouths were trying to climb.
Once all four of the girls were gathered in the living room, Kim Hyunjo clapped.
"If everybody's actually awake, let's do introductions. These are people you'll be working with for a while. Family."
"What, the manager oppas are changing again?"
"What about Cheol-hyung oppa?"
"That guy ghosted," Kim Hyunjo said. "Changed his number, too."
"Seriously? That's too much. He could've at least said something before he quit."
"Don't even say his name. He ticks me off."
"I kind of saw it coming, though. He was always sullen, staring at nothing but legs. It was creepy."
As Seoyoung grumbled, LJ ran her eyes down Seoyoung's legs.
"Don't worry about your legs. You know how many legs are in this room? You think he went out of his way to look at yours, too?"
"What?"
The two who were the same age fought whenever a gap opened, and Lee Taehee, the leader, showed no interest whatsoever in stepping in. A free-range leader. And Lee Songha had been holding an apple core since earlier, meticulously gnawing off whatever flesh was left.
"And the conversation's wandering off again. I said introduce yourselves. We don't have time."
Kim Hyunjo thumped me on the back. I swallowed and smiled with everything I had.
"Hello, I'm Jung Sunwoo."
"Age," Kim Hyunjo added, "way older than all of you. Nickname's Auntie Jung."
"Chief. That's an old nickname..."
Lim Seoyoung's hand shot up.
"Question! Why Auntie Jung?"
"Quadruplet nephews. Says he was their babysitter."
"Whoa."
I hadn't meant to play that card, but the quadruplet nephews worked here, too. The members looked at me like I had hung the moon. Is an image like this really all right?
"And this is Choi Geon-young. Worked with Blackout for a bit."
"Ahem. Hello. I'm Choi Geon-young."
The Neptune members introduced themselves in a row. Ordinary greetings, nothing more. I had heard that some celebrities blew off steam by cursing at their managers and snapping at them, so I had been worried, but these girls didn't seem like that at all.
Is it because they haven't made it yet? If they blow up, will they change?
They were young enough that we had agreed to drop the formal speech, but I still needed to brace myself. Seeing beauties like this—four of them—from this close was a first in my life. Moderately pretty and I might have managed. They were so overwhelmingly pretty that it was still a burden.
I would get used to it, little by little.
Wait. If I get used to this and my standards shoot through the roof, isn't that a problem, too?
"We've said hello to the new family. Let's go. Up."
Kim Hyunjo checked the clock and hurried us. All of us got our backsides off the seats and stood.
"Is it cold outside, Oppa?"
"A bit. Put something on over that."
The members came out with a coat or a blanket each draped over their slender shoulders.
Outside, it was still pitch-dark.
Thirty minutes by car to the salon in Cheongdam-dong. While the artists sat glued to their chairs for hair and makeup, another two hours slipped past.
All the managers did in the meantime was stand guard over blankets and bags and wait.
Kim Hyunjo slept. Choi Geon-young dozed. I yawned and fiddled with my phone, gathering everything I could on Neptune—saving the flattering photos, pulling up their music-show stages to monitor, downloading the tracks and listening on a loop.
Over the past two years, Neptune had released four albums in all. One was a packed full-length, one a four-song mini, and the other two were digital singles with a single track apiece. Every last one of them had flopped. There were more than ten songs, and I had never heard a single one.
The title tracks didn't seem bad. This latest single especially—the chorus hooked straight into the ear. The album credits listed a composer whose name I recognized, and if I recognized it, that person was famous. The choreography was good enough to stare through, blank, for all three minutes, and the music video had the look of money spent on it. Search every streaming site I liked, though, and the song was nowhere inside the charts.
Why can't these girls break?
The songs were fine and the faces were pretty. What else did they need? Was it luck, after all?
There was that girl group that had once turned the whole country upside down. Nobodies—rookies already past their fresh date—until a video spread on social media and became a sensation, and a song that hadn't even been on the charts shot all the way to number one.
People say the song was just that good, that they were a group built to make it, that the ones who are meant to rise always do in the end. Easy to say, once they have already risen.
Cases like that were not rare. So besides the songs and the visuals, you needed luck. And luck was not something you could buy with money, and not something effort alone could manage. The people planning idols must have had one hell of a headache.
Then again, it wasn't only idols. There had to be plenty of actors who were pretty, handsome, and good at acting and still never made it. Even the top actors people now called box-office guarantees—a lot of them had spent long years when nobody knew their names. Hmm. I ought to look into what finally set people like that off.
Around seven, I ran a food errand. They told me to hit a convenience store and bring back whatever looked edible, so I swept up lunch boxes, salads, and everything else that would pass. That was breakfast. One look at how this job worked, and I knew eating a proper meal was a lost cause.
After the members finished hair and makeup, we crammed ourselves back into the van. Today's schedule was a music show on a cable network.
K-Pop Concert. K-Pop Con, for short.
My nephews were devoted viewers, so I had been dragged along to watch it with them a few times. A crowd spills out, sings, and files off. A crowd spills out, dances, and files off. They all looked the same to me, but the kids could rattle off every name, which had thrown me.
The van took the Olympic Expressway out toward Sangam-dong. The road was tangled with people driving in to work.
I was yawning at the window when I noticed the world had gone bright.
Right. It was morning.
By the feel of it, half a day had already passed since I had clocked in. The day, though, was only just getting started.